


Reassembly

by Yossk



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Gen, Minor Bruce Banner/Natasha Romanov, Natasha Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-12-11 14:01:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11715849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yossk/pseuds/Yossk
Summary: “I need you to understand. That’s not me. Natasha Romanoff is brave. Natasha Romanoff fights for the little guy and rescues children from burning buildings and saves the world.” She chuckles, injecting false irony into something which is only the truth. “But that’s not me. That’s just… a character I choose to play. Inside, there’s nothing. A void waiting to be filled. I’m nothing.”





	Reassembly

**Author's Note:**

> Author's Note 1: It's bothered me for a while that so few Marvel movies come anywhere close to passing the Bechdel test. And I loved the little hint we got of Laura & Natasha's friendship in AoU - So I decided to imagine the conversation that might have taken place if Laura had exited the bathroom whilst Natasha was waiting, instead of Bruce. I might have messed with the timeline a little - In my head, this takes place after Clint & Laura's conversation in their bedroom, and whilst Steve & Tony are chopping wood outside, but before their argument.
> 
> Author's Note 2: This is the first fanfiction I have written in about 10 years (and therefore the first ever for MCU). So I'm pretty nervous about that. But I know that if I stare at this any longer, I'll never get it out. Also, I'm happier with the end than the beginning. So please be nice, but I'd also really appreciate constructive criticism. I had so much fun writing this, and I'd like to try more.

Laura washes her hands at the bathroom sink, her mind working through clean sheets, spare towels, food to defrost (lots of it - what do gods eat?) and everything else that having six super heroes unexpectedly turn up in your living room entails. She thanks god it’s half-term, so there’s no school runs and early morning child-wrangling to deal with, but the kids do need watching if her and her husband are ever going to get any alone time and which of the Avengers would she trust to keep an eye on them? Nat, obviously, but the others, who knew? And how long are they staying anyway and is she going to have to stop Steve and Tony’s wood chopping competition before they run out of trees…

She starts slightly when she opens the door to find Natasha sat on her bed in a dressing gown. Damn that women can be quiet when she wants to be.

"Hi." Laura smiles, "Sorry, I thought you guys were all done with the showers. You might be too late, I think Tony used up all the hot water."

Nat looks...not quite lost, but something close. More… blank. Laura's not exactly clear what chain of events lead to Clint bringing the entire team into their home, but she has an inkling that the look in Nat's eyes has a whole lot to do with it. He’s close to the rest of the team, but she’s not sure he would have opened up his inner sanctum for anyone else. 

"Thought so. I heard Steve's manly shriek from the other bathroom." Natasha’s lips quirk faintly as she says it, but her eyes are still unseeing. 

"Nat."

"Yeah?" An eyebrow quirk this time.

"I'm glad you’re here." And she means it in an 'I think you need to be here' rather than an ‘I missed you’ kind of way (although the latter is also true). Because she knows that the Barton family farm is home to Natasha in a way that Avenger's tower, and her flat in New York (and probably a hundred or more other safe houses she has squirrelled away around the world) will never be. But Nat doesn’t really acknowledge her, she keeps staring out of the window but she’s not really seeing and Laura can sense tension in every line of her shoulders. She’s not putting on a front for the team or the kids any more, and Laura’s glad (so, so glad) she doesn’t feel the need to do so with her. But she’s also not revealing anything, the shutters have come down and Laura has no idea where her mind has gone, or how to get her back.

She still hasn't made any move to go into the bathroom, so Laura takes the opportunity to sit down next to her on the bed. She doesn't turn around, doesn’t respond in any visible way, so Laura decides to wait her out. She's in no rush. She has nothing more important to do.

The minutes tick by, and eventually Natasha speaks. Her voice is low, and pained, and Laura has reached for her hand even before she hears what she’s saying.

"I had this, um, dream. The kind that seems normal at the time. But when you wake..." She stops, and finally turns away from the window.

"What did you dream?"

"That I was an Avenger. That I was anything more than the assassin they made me."

_Oh Nat._

Laura’s first instinct is to envelop her in a hug, and then to beat her around the head with a pillow and tell her to stop being so stupid. They’ve been here before, after all. But she senses there’s something else to this, something has happened that she doesn’t know about. And provoking a potentially volatile assassin whilst pregnant, however friendly, is probably not her best plan.

She takes both her hands instead.

“Nat. Nat, please look at me.” She turns towards her, but her eyes are focussed somewhere on the headboard behind Laura’s head. _Where are you?_ “That’s rubbish and you know it. You and Clint are the bravest of them all. You do everything they do, but when you get thrown off the top of a building, you know you won’t bounce. Or fly. Or whatever it is Steve does. But you do it anyway.”

Natasha’s shaking her head and smiling before she’s finished the first sentence, but her smile is more of a grimace. She removes her hands from Laura’s and grips the mattress on either side of her instead. “No.” She stops her, and her voice is flat and unsure and unlike anything Laura has ever heard before. “I need you to understand. That’s not me. Natasha Romanoff is brave. Natasha Romanoff fights for the little guy and rescues children from burning buildings and saves the world.” She chuckles, injecting false irony into something which is only the truth. “But that’s not me. That’s just… a character I choose to play. Inside, there’s nothing. A void waiting to be filled. I’m nothing.”

She stops, then. Laura knows she should say something. She wants to take her by the shoulders and either shake her or hug her, she’s not sure which. But the shutters are still down and Nat’s retreated somewhere deep in her mind, and it’s going to take more than that to reach her this time. They have been here before.

Nat speaks first. “You all think Bruce is the one with the monster inside. But it’s not him, it’s me.”

She needs more information if they’re going to get anywhere. Might as well go straight to the source. “What happened? Clint said there were some kids.” She pauses, waits a moment, hoping for a response. “He said you took a hit.”

“Is that what he called it?” her voice is sharp, now.

Laura shrugs. She waits again. She’s good at waiting.

Eventually: “There were two of them.” She’s not looking at Laura, but she’s not looking away from her either. She’s staring straight at the wall next to the bathroom door, but her eyes are unfocussed as if she’s seeing something else, and her knuckles have whitened against the mattress. “One of them was too fast to see, which was new and annoying, but it looks like everybody has a super power these days so I suppose it was inevitable sooner or later.” She’s stalling and trying for humour. Laura knows it, and Natasha knows she knows it.

“And the other? What was her super power?”

“She was in my mind.” There’s silence then, and the lights are on and Laura can see the train rushing towards her. _So that’s why we’ve suddenly regressed ten years. Punks indeed._

“She showed me…us. Nightmares. Or memories. I’m not sure I’d be able to tell the difference.”

“What did you see?”

“What do you think I saw?” She practically spits it out, and there’s an undercurrent of anger. _Good, anger we can work with._

“Tell me.”

“I… I saw myself being made. Emptied out and filled with whatever they needed. Again, and again, until there was nothing of me left inside. A figurine made of marble. They took anything they didn’t like and threw it away. And anything they did like, I threw away later. There’s nothing left. Natalia Romanova died a very long time ago, and Natasha Romanoff? She’s a ghost.” It all comes out in a rush, all the anger and rage and confusion which Laura thought had been dealt with so long ago, and it turns out she’d just buried it so deep it took someone else digging around in her mind to find it again.

There’s only one way to go from here. “You’re right.” Natasha looks at her in cold surprise. “Natalia Romanova is dead. And we’ll never know who that little girl would have been. We can’t change that. And I am so incredibly selfish because I don’t wish that we could.” Laura reaches a hand towards Natasha again, but she stiffens under her touch. “Because whatever you believe about her, Natasha Romanoff is very real, and she’s my friend. And I wouldn’t want to lose her. You said it yourself, you chose to be her, Nat. You chose to be brave and selfless and funny, no-one made you do that. You chose to be Aunt Nat to my kids. No-one can take that choice away from you.”

“Just because I can play a character, doesn’t mean I am her. I’m a spy. I’m good at acting.”

“Am I a bad mother because I think about throttling Cooper sometimes, or am I a good one because I choose to put him on the naughty step and take away his sweets instead?” 

Natasha looks at her in disbelief, “It’s not the same.”

“It’s exactly the same.” 

Laura knows it’s not _exactly_ the same, because she was grounded to begin with. She has always had context – family, friends, neighbours, people she nods at on the street who know who she is now, and who she was yesterday, and how it all rolls together to make _Laura_. She’s made her own choices and created her own character from the moment she refused to get in the pram and insisted that she _would_ walk the mile and a half home from the shops, all by herself and unassisted. Nat sees her and Clint, and everyone else who wasn’t brought up as a tool in someone else’s arsenal, and doesn’t understand that they chose to be who they are just as much as she chooses now. They just had a whole lot more time, and a whole lot more practice.

(and the fact that Laura can look at Natasha and call Clint’s upbringing ‘nearly normal’ breaks her heart every time)

“Those bastards took so much from you, but they didn’t, they couldn’t, take _you_. They just put you on hold for a while. You are whoever you choose to be, just like me.”

They’re not quite _there_ yet, but it looks like they might be past the gate. Laura puts her hand on the other woman’s shoulder, and the tension still radiates from her, but she doesn’t shrug her off. They sit in silence for a while, listening to the rhythmic chopping and murmur of competitive voices coming from the boys outside. Natasha is slowly clawing her way to the surface again, untangling what’s _her_ from what’s _them_ , choosing the bits she wants and discarding those she doesn’t. What’s left is surprisingly similar to what she had before. Maybe Laura put her finger on something after all. 

A slight tremor runs through her, and her expression clears a little. Her eyes are still troubled, and her brow is furrowed, but the lights are on again. It’s not over, Laura knows, there will be nightmares and set-backs and all of the shit they went through before. But once you’ve shored up the foundations, the rest will come, in time.

“Back with us?”

The smile is small, but it starts from her eyes this time “Think so.”

She waits for a moment, gives Natasha space to say something, or leave, or do whatever she needs to do to move forward from this point. And then she nudges her friend gently in the ribs. “So, want to tell me about Bruce?”

“What about him?” She tries to sound innocent, but the small half-smirk, half-smile entirely gives her away. Natasha Romanoff is not actually a great actor when she’s not on the job.

“You know exactly what I mean, Ms Romanoff, I see you.”

She won’t acknowledge it out loud, but her eyes say _ok fine yes you win_. She looks pensive “I don’t think now’s the time. I think he got it as bad as I did back there.”

“Then maybe now’s exactly the time.”

She shrugs, “Probably when both our lives are in imminent danger, we’ll finally get around to it. Proper blockbuster style.” Natasha’s eyes are still tired and haunted, and it’s going to take more than just this to bring her back to herself. But she knows where she’s going now, and that’s a start. “Did I hear something about a cold shower?”

“Afraid so. But you’d better hurry up before little Nat jumps on my bladder again.”

She doesn’t get up straight away, and Laura can see her working her way to saying something important before she turns and looks her in the eye for the first time since Laura sat down.

“Thanks” Her smile is small, but genuine.

“Any time.” Laura’s is too.

**Author's Note:**

> Ok, so yes, I did slip up slightly, and they do mention a man at the end. But it's not what the conversation is _about_. And I needed something to lighten the mood a little, and bring them back to something approaching 'normal', and that just seemed to fit.


End file.
